The task of collating and storing personal health data on a computer is too hard for the U.K. Government and its IT Contractors. We can manage the dissemination of personal data with breathless ease - leave it on a train, lose it in the mail, copy it to tiny storage devices and then can't find the damn things but simple database applications, like the ability to make Roman roads, has disappeared.
The Financial Times reports that Worthing and Southlands NHS Trust are considering reverting to a 20 year old system NHS trust considers abandoning electronic records , their source is E-Health Insider.
Whenever the cost and timescale of the NHS system is "revised" I generally re-publish my post suggesting that Google should run this computer service , here is my most recent. It would be free, it would work and their track record on privacy is better than the Government's. The boring old fart in me applauds the return to a paper based system. This has to be the justenoughtechnology solution, after all we are mainly healthy and visits to doctors and hospitals are infrequent. However suppose our health had the same intensity as TV medical dramas , what better system to match this than Facebook . All the complex mechanics of running a database with details of hundreds of millions of people are proven and the privacy is better than the Government systems. As well as smiling photos your doctor friends could upload x-rays, your status could be updated to form a list of all the inoculations and illnessses and your partying could be recorded in pictures from the youthful excesses and vomiting all the way to middle aged liver failure.
Obviously you would want to get your privacy settings correct but otherwise this is a system that is ready to go. There may be some concerns expressed by old fogeys but the upcoming generation would welcome it with open arms. Did I mention it was free?
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